The pre-colonial education in the Middle East including SA was mainly the responsibility of Mosque schools (maalama) and was thus permeated by religion. It relied heavily on studying and memorising the Qur’an, and the use of religious scriptures, texts or stories to teach ostensibly secular subjects, such as geography or history (Asad, 2009). The individuals who provided or presided over those services were religious scholars who saw the education of young boys to be one of their many religious duties in the community; and they were not full-time teachers. This type of non-formal education was directed towards the development of the individual’s personality, and provision of the best quality of life, not merely in relation to an individual’s future practical needs, such as knowing how to read and write and do basic arithmetic, but also in relation to his/ her moral behaviour, and attitudes.
The colonial penetration of SA, introduced a new model of Western education. According to Starrett (Starrett, 1998), at that time this model was also new in the west,
“It was not until 1862 that British law made the efficient teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, rather than doctrinal matters, the acknowledged centre of the curriculum and the subjects qualifying a school for government grants-in aid”.
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The handfuls of schools created in SA mainly in Aden by the colonial administration were designed to produce the educated personnel needed mainly for the colonial bureaucracy. Thus, the establishment of the British educational model and its institutions in SA was used as a tool for serving the colonial socio-economic and political system. Kelly and Altbach (Kelly and Altbach, 1984:2) state that:
“Colonial schools sought to extend foreign domination and economic exploitation of the colony”.
Since the colonial administration was only interested in producing the raw material for the benefit of its imperial project development, it bore no relation to the development needs of the wider population of the colony. Nevertheless, this project faced different responses from the population of the colony. There were those who accepted what the colonial power introduced and there were those who refused and rejected this opportunity. This should remind us of what Albert Memmi (Memmi, 1991) pointed out to in relation to the colonised person who accepts the colonial situation and the person who refuses to be colonized. In this particular case, probably not all the population of SA responded positively to this type of education and this is perhaps what made Hickinbotham (Hickinbotham, 1958: 154) claim that:
“In all rural areas, education seems to be of secondary importance to the inhabitants and the Aden protectorate was no exception to this rule”.
It might be useful for us to ask whether an Eastern/Islamic educational model, which introduced to the West under an Eastern colonial administration would have fared any better; how many people in the west would be interested in such educational model? The rejection of the educational project offered by the colonial power in SA was probably due to the fact that the model minimized the amount of time devoted to religion in the schools. It was not based on religious faith, and was not taught through the medium of religious texts (Starrett, 1998).
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Nevertheless, education is considered as the most important means to develop nations, the most powerful weapon for improving a person’s status as well as the most potent force for social change. Furthermore, the term education process according to Carmen (Carmen, 1996:64) is often used as a synonym for the development process. The acceptance of this western educational model by a small number of people worked very well for the colonial administration’s interests as the colonial power probably was not very keen in educating or developing the whole population. This view point has been supported by Ajayi, Goma and Johnson (Roberts, 1997) who assert that at all events the prevalent attitude of the colonial regimes was to neglect education for the masses or, at any rate, seek to limit its provision.
On the other hand, and according to the records of the Colonial Office, in the education proposal that was introduced by the government of Aden in 1958- 1959 (TNA, 1958) and contrary to what Hickinbotham (Hickinbotham, 1958) claimed, there was a strong need and desire for education among the people of the protectorates. Those people were mostly people of the Western Protectorate, one of which is a state ruled by the Fadhli family, who were considered as one of the closet allies of the colonial power.
The aforementioned colonial education proposal (TNA, 1958: 10) alleges that:
“In 1958 education on modern lines is a very recent
development indeed in this protectorate and that at that time there were very small number of local people with sufficient educational background”.
In the same vein, Hickinbotham (1958) believed that there was a lack of sufficiently well-educated and trained men to staff their own schools. Such belief, however, is probably a fairly typical idea in the mind of the coloniser who tends to perceive himself as superior in terms of educational background, regardless of how relevant this educational background might be to the culture of the colonised. A relatively similar picture has been drawn by Paulo Freire (Freire, 2000) in his famous book the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he introduces the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the ‘scope of action’
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permitted to those who receive education widens only up to the level of receiving. Freire suggests that knowledge in this case can be seen as a donation or a reward from those who consider themselves ‘knowledgeable’ upon those whom they consider to know nothing.
“Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a
characteristic of the ideology of oppression”
(Freire, 2000: 46)
Here I will not attempt to embark even further on writing on the colonial achievements on education in SA. I think it is rather more important at this stage to mention that the colonial education proposal in the Colony was not organised and implemented by the Director of Education until the 1950’s. The core objective of this proposal was to make the most of local talents in order to carry out any development schemes that may have been envisaged (Hickinbotham, 1958). The need for personnel in certain areas like health was a necessity in order to combat the spread of diseases and meet the population’s health or medical demands. The next section will attempt to review health and health services in SA in the period under study. What we know so far about nursing, whether as a service, or occupation in the period when SA was under the British rule, will be also reviewed.
3.4 Health and Nursing Services in SA (1950-1967)